Kojima Says Sony Dropped Physint on a Zoom Call - and He Still Doesn't Know Why

I've read a lot of "studio parts ways with publisher" stories over the years, and most of them are wrapped in so much press-release cotton wool that you never learn what actually happened. This one is different, and it stings a little.

Hideo Kojima has given IGN his first interview since the news broke last week that PlayStation had pulled out of Physint, the stealth-action project everyone reads as a spiritual successor to Metal Gear Solid. And the way he tells it, there was no slow fade. Back in June, Sony asked him to join a Zoom call. He brought along Kojima Productions president Shinji Hirano and head of talent development Aki Saito, expecting a normal meeting. Instead, he was told that PlayStation was stepping away from the project and that the funding would stop. That was the whole conversation.

Kojima says his mind simply went blank. His first thought, in his own words, was what he was going to do with his studio. Kojima Productions isn't a two-person garage; it's a company with a couple of hundred people, and for a while he kept the news to himself while he worried about whether he'd have to let developers go. That detail is the one that stayed with me. It's easy to think of Kojima as this untouchable auteur, but here he sounds like any small-business owner who just watched their biggest client walk out the door.

The part that bothers me most, kindly but clearly: according to the interview, he still doesn't know why. He says Sony hasn't been in touch since, and that he isn't fighting with them. There has been reporting elsewhere pointing at budgets, schedules and Death Stranding 2's performance, but Kojima Productions itself asked people to treat that speculation with scepticism, so I'm not going to repeat it as fact. What we know is that a long, very public partnership ended in one video call with no explanation the man in charge feels he can share.

And then there's the underdog beat, which is where my heart lives. Xbox stepped in. Physint now has a new publisher, and Kojima's other game, the horror project OD, was already an Xbox title. Say what you like about Microsoft's own wobbly year; picking up a studio that was staring at layoffs is exactly the kind of move I want to see rewarded. Metal Gear was a PlayStation thing for most of my life. Its spiritual heir landing on Xbox is genuinely strange to type.

What this really is, for me, is a reminder of how fragile the "prestige exclusive" model has become. If a creator with Kojima's name and track record can be cut loose over a video call, no smaller studio should feel safe. I hope the next time we hear about Physint, it's a trailer and not a postmortem. Kojima sounds like he's earned that much.

Image: Nicolas Richoffer / CC BY-SA 4.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hideo_Kojima_2008.jpg